My hand hovers over the paper.
I twist and flip the pencil in my hand.
My mind swims in images and words.
Colours and thoughts.

*but the paper remains blank

Destroy me softly in the dead of night.
Rip apart my thoughts with gentle words
and steady hands.

Do not question yourself,
I promise not to protest in return.

Ask me where my words are hidden,
how I bury them
and dig to them without pause so that my muscles won't have time to push you back.

Unearth my dreams,
ransack my heart until we are both covered in blood and truth.

I don't care how much it hurts,
turn my mind inside out and
force
every
thought into your palms.

Pry open those rusty hinges
because heaven knows I am just as clueless as you are to what lies behind them.

And I know, I know, I know
that what is underneath my skin is raw and pink.

Tell me how it tastes.

Ive given up
on you,
on me.
On you and me.

For you will
never
Be for me.

And thats
OK.
Or at least
it will be.

I’m drenched
in the flood
which has yet to come

I’m *******
in the prison
which has yet to exist



Not having played
the game of chess
I’m already the checkmate



Not having tasted
a single cup of your wine
I’m already drunk



Not having entered
the battlefield

I’m already wounded and slain



I no longer
know the difference
between image and reality



Like the shadow
I am

And

I am not

Love is the cure,
for your pain will keep giving birth to more pain
until your eyes constantly exhale love
as effortlessly as your body yields its scent.”

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!

Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.

Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.

Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.

Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
blown off into emptiness.

These words I'm saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:

Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.